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New sodium ion battery stores twice the energy and desalinates seawater (www.sciencedaily.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 76 points 7 months ago (40 children)

I can only hope these can actually hit commercialization, unlike most new battery technologies that never leave the lab.

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  • [–] 103 points 7 months ago (38 children)

    Yes, because battery technology stagnated years ago...

    Oh wait

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  • [–] 54 points 7 months ago (20 children)

    Great response, people just love to parrot easy dismissals without looking and the sheer magnitude on innovation and commercialisation going on in this sector

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    It doesn't really dispute it, though. Lithium-ion has seen a lot of improvement, yes, because it's already a giant industry; other battery chemistries have a hard time breaking through because they require entirely different processes to manufacture.
    I'm still rooting for it, but it's not really the same thing.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    This too is false, great progress has been made on for instance solid state batteries.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (4 children)

    Some progress is being made, but it hasn't seen large-scale adoption yet. Which is the point, as I read it.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    It takes time to scale up production, CATL is already building factories for it:

    https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html

    On April 21, 2025, CATL unveiled three groundbreaking EV battery products at its inaugural Super Tech Day: The Freevoy Dual-Power Battery, Naxtra - the world's first mass produced sodium-ion battery

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    The "progress" is typical industry bullshit. See the absolute bullshit around the Donut SS battery.

    Remember when Musk invented a battery with 30% better capacity? It was a 30% bigger battery.

    SS batteries require manufacturing facilities with clean rooms on the order of chip fabs. You may see these in 2027, but only in expensive cars.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    You can't buy anything with solid state batteries yet, and when you can, they will cost a fortune.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Uhh you know you can buy an external mag safe battery bank with a solid state battery for like 45 bucks on amazon as well as the big generator ones as well?

    I agree that cost isn't amazing. You are essentially getting about half the capacity per dollar spent to a standard battery device but also these are in fact more stable for temp swings and damage. Soo... consumer available and not a fortune just need to have justification for it.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago* (10 children)

    Well all those graphs show is that the cost of batteries has gone down and that as a result electric cars contain more batteries and therefore more range. It doesn't actually show that the individual battery capacity has increased.

    The third graph that indicates battery performance vs battery chemistry doesn't really show incremental improvement it just shows general improvement but there's plenty of battery chemistries that are worse than pre-existing ones.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (8 children)

    @Warl0k3@lemmy.world The hero we need!

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    Did you mean to tag me?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    You are a literal scientist or something that always answers these questions. We need you!

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

    Start of my villain arc right here. Like unidan, but with more buttholes.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Uh yeah, not a good idea now that I think about it, apologies.

    But since you are already here, the guy above me says batteries have not improved much, and I'm too dumb to argue.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    I won't let it go to my head. I promise. Probably.

    Anyways tho for an actual opinion:

    This thread is a bit of a mess and I would caution taking anything being said (except by me, the absolute authority) without a large grain of salt - however mostly people aren't contradicting each other, it's just a hugely complex topic that quickly devolves into semantic-adjacent arguments about how we should be comparing battery chemistries (on market / in lab / cross-chemistry) and what degree we should be considering the "soft factors"; things like the number of recharge cycles, robustness of the cells to damage, cost of manufacturing and/or recycling the cells, etc.

    Sodium batteries are a big deal, and as far as I've seen we're finally at the point where they're starting to become market viable, but they're still a largely unproven technology. Arguing that battery tech hasn't improved in the last decade is obviously wrong, but it's also not wrong to say that there hasn't been any dramatic improvement in the technology in the last decade. None of the many "miracle battery tech" announcements that promise to have double-or-better the capacity of lithium chemistries has panned out, we've just been making slow gains across many chemistries and those cumulative 10% improvements to battery life year-over-year are finally starting to add up to where the average consumer can really notice them.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Just to clarify, because I feel that I'm being impuned in some way, my only comment was that while there has been significant development in batteries in the lab up until now this is the first commercially available battery includement since we got off lithium polymer.

    The original comment I was responding to was trying to suggest that battery technology over the last decade has significantly improved but realistically all we've done is being come clever with the technology we already have, and that this is the first time battery technology at a commercial level has improved. After all, a lot of ICE cars are still using lead acid batteries, and the remote control for my TV uses batteries that my grandparents would have recognised.

    I remember while back when lithium oxygen batteries were the new hotness and that never went anywhere.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    caution taking anything being said (except by me, the absolute authority)

    Oh man, I am so glad we finally have one of those. I was worried I was stuck in this confusing thread about semantics with just my own broken brain.

    Oh absolute authority... When we will give rocks boobs?

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (7 children)

    TBF, there are a lot of "battery breakthroughs" that turn out to just be hot air. Battery technology has made tremendous progress though and there is still a lot of room for improvement.

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  • [–] -2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    There actually is not a lot of room for improvement. Highest energy will still be limited to lithium chemistry because of the periodic table.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    That's a limit on gravimetric energy density. There are plenty of other parameters that can be improved.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    There are plenty of other parameters that can be improved.

    You don't know that. This is chemistry, not Moore's stupid law.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    no, actually, we do know that… things like cycle time, lifetime cycles, their durability < 20% and > 80%, performance in the cold, sustained current

    lots of these are to do with heat and degradation, but these are all problems that can be solved to improve batteries in general… some of them are inherently to lithium chemistry and easily solved with others

    sodium batteries, for example, are better in most categories other than wh/kg making them not useful for portable electronics and cars etc but for stationary applications these benefits can significantly outweigh the major downside because wh/kg is not a useful metric (eg grid storage)… especially true when sodium batteries are able to deal with higher operating temperatures which means you don’t need as much if any extra cooling, which is getting close to making up for even energy density of the system in some situations

    flow batteries are also real things, as are hydrogen fuel cells

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Weird, I didn't know Lithium-Ion batteries were still in the lab. I thought for sure we were using those already. I thought the batteries in the labs were various solid-state batteries like graphene or like this sodium-ion battery, where there's been a rise in patents around it but not a lot delivered

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently.

    LFP sits in the low cost marker while NCA is the highest performing of the mass market batteries, and NMC is somewhere in between.

    Sodium might be coming for LFP's low cost position, and is already beginning mass production (some Chinese manufacturers expect those models to hit the road in a few months).

    If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn't making it into mass produced products today, you're just not paying attention.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently

    Like what? [Citation required]

    If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn’t making it into mass produced products today, you’re just not paying attention.

    Please provide examples.

    I mean, as much as a person who doesn't work in research and development of energy storage, or work in industries directly related to it, I personally feel I've kept up. The day Donut Labs announced their battery I was watching review videos about it, and I want to believe, but until I see it for purchase, I'm not going to call it a win.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    I mean the first diagram is effectively useless without knowledge of battery density. They as well could compare the 2010 compacts with 2025s SUVs which have probably 2x the amount of total capacity.
    For the other charts: Agreed.

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  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    All that data says is batteries got cheaper so they are putting more of them into cars. Also 100 to 300 wh/kg is in labs. No explanation why it went from 175 to 100 Wh/kg 08-10.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    We've had 3 major changes in battery chemistry in the last 45 years. Energy density, lifespan, cost, and dangerous materials have all generally improved. We also have 2 new battery technologies in the process of becoming generally commercially available. Also, batteries went from 500 mAh batteries about the size of your smartphone to 3000 mAh as a minor component of that same smartphone, about an order of magnitude in energy density.

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